The Earth and Its Inhabitants/Asia/Volume 1/Chapter 4
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effecting exchanges with the interior, where its basin offers a navigable waterway of altogether not less than 6,000 miles.*
The natural resources of this basin, whose entire population scarcely exceeds 300,000, rival those of West Siberia. The river itself abounds in fish no less than the Ob, while its forests are more extensive. It is also skirted by fertile plains and plateaux affording excellent pasture. The auriferous sands of the Vitim and Olokma are the richest in all Asia; argentiferous lead, copper, and iron ores are met in various places, although no systematic survey has yet been made of these treasures. Salt in superabundance is yielded by many lakes, saline springs, and whole mountains of chloride of sodium. Sulphur springs rise along the river banks, and are lost in the stream. Lastly, coal beds belonging to the same formation as those of the Nijnyaya Tunguska basin crop out along the banks of the Vilûi, and skirt the Lena almost uninterruptedly for over 900 miles below the "Colonnades." Some of these coal-fields, kindled by the forest fires, have been burning for years, and the smoke rising from the eminences have given occasion to the local traditions regarding the existence of volcanoes in North Siberia.
The Yana, Kolima, and Indigirka Rivers—The Arctic Islands—New Siberia.
The Kharaûlakh Hills, raising their snowy, or at least snow-streaked, crests here and there to a height of 1,300 feet, separate the Lower Lena from the Yana, which flows directly to the north, and enters the Arctic Ocean through a vast delta over 90 miles broad east and west. The southern extremity of the Kharaûlakh Hills is connected by the Verkho-Yansk range eastwards with the Stanovoi plateau along the northern edge of the Aldan valley. The route from Yakutsk to Nijne-Kolimsk, on the Lower Kolîma, crosses this range by a pass 2,150 feet high, commanded by crests rising to an elevation of from 830 to 1,000 feet. The road to Verkho-Yansk, on the Upper Yana, also follows a pass 4,660 feet high, winding through a defile 660 feet deep. The Indigirka and the Kolîma, which, like the Yana, rise on the northern slopes of the Verkho-Yansk range, bear a striking resemblance to this river in the length and direction of their course, the volume of their stream, the rapids formed in their upper reaches, and the islands of their deltas. All rise in the same wooded highlands, and flow northwards through the level plain of the tundras; but, although navigable, none of them are frequented except by the fishing craft of the Yakuts, Yukaghirs, and a few Russian settlers. The most abundant in animal life is the Kolîma, which, like the two Anyûi joining its east bank in a common delta, teems with fishes of various kinds.
| Fig. 202.—Archipelago of New Siberia. |
| Scale 1 : 4,120,000. |
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 6 Miles.
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A few of the islands off the neighbouring coast have been known from time immemorial to the natives, and by them pointed out to the early Russian explorers. Such are the "Bear Islands," north of the Kolîma estuary, occupied during the last century by numerous winter fishing huts. The so-called "Four Pillars," one of this group, forms a conspicuous landmark with its four detached basalt columns, almost as regular as if they had been carved by the hand of man. The sailors of the Nordenskjöld expedition took them for lighthouses erected by the Russian Government for the guidance of explorers in the polar waters. Another of the Bear Islands abounds in the remains of mammoths to such an extent that when seen from the southern mainland it seemed composed entirely of the tusks of these pachydermata. Some of the larger polar islands said to have been discovered in the last century, or even more recently, would also seem to have been visited by the natives. Thus the so-called "Near" or "First" Island of the Lyakhov Archipelago (New Siberia) cannot have been completely unknown, as the magnificent basalt columns forming the Kiselyak headland and Mount Keptagai, several hundred yards high, are only 45 miles from Cape Svyatoi, and are consequently, in clear weather, always visible to the piercing gaze of the Tunguses and Yukaghirs. The wild reindeer, as well as the white bear and other animals, including even the smaller rodents, visit it across the ice from the mainland, and the hunters had only to follow in their wake to discover "Near Island." From this point to "Second Island" the passage is also very easy; but the "Third," or Kotyelnîy Ostrov, besides several others lying farther west, must have remained long unknown, although in one of them a Russian grave was discovered in 1811. Hedenström here found a Yukaghir sleigh and a stone knife, pointing to a remote period, for the Yukaghirs have long used iron knives, which they procure from the Russians. Kotyelnîy Ostrov is a very large island, with an area estimated by Anjou at at 8,000, and by Hedenström at no less than 24,000 square miles. It is generally connected by a barrier of reefs and extensive sand-banks with the island of Faddeyev (Thaddæus), lying farther east, with an intervening channel 560 feet wide, through which the tides rush to and fro with great velocity. During stormy weather the connecting sand-bank is washed by the waves.
The most recently discovered, or rather rediscovered, land in these waters is the island known as New Siberia, a name frequently applied to the whole group of islands on the north coast between the mouths of the Lena and Indigirka. It was first sighted by the trader Sirovatsky in 1806, and was carefully explored in 1809–10 by Hedenström, Sannikov, and Kojevin. It was again visited in 1820–3 during the Wrangell expedition, and since then hunters have never ceased to pass the winter there in the huts built for the purpose by Sannikov. Like the neighbouring islands, New Siberia is tolerably rich in animal species, thanks to the bridge of ice by which it is yearly connected with the mainland. 
| Fig. 204.—Konyam Bay: the Vega at Anchor. |
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Its fauna comprises the white bear, reindeer, Arctic fox, glutton, some small rodents, and numerous species of birds. Here the hunters also find the remains of extinct animals, mammoth and rhinoceros ivory, buffalo horns, horse hoofs, and Hedenström picked up an axe made of a mammoth's tusk. The beach is strewn with the stems of the larch and poplar stranded by the waves, but the great curiosity of the island is a row of hills fringing the south coast for a distance of over 3 miles, whose sandstone and gravel formations contain considerable masses of carbonised timber, referred by some to the Jurassic epoch, but regarded by others merely as drift-wood of recent date. Although these "Wood Hills" are only from 100 to 200 feet above sea-level, the mirage sometimes renders them visible from the Siberian coast, 168 miles off.
During his numerous exploring expeditions east of New Siberia, Wrangell had his mind steadily fixed on a northern land of which the natives had spoken, and towards which he saw the birds of passage directing their flight. A chart also, preserved amongst the foreign archives of Moscow, figured an island in these northern latitudes. During his three trips across the Siberian ice he was arrested by a polînia or "clearing," such as all other Arctic navigators have found, and which have caused the name of Polynia to be given to the open sea met by Hayes in the American polar seas north of Smith Sound. The ice at the edge of the polînia was too weak to carry sleighs farther north, and the sea was distinctly felt surging in long billows underneath. Wrangell's explorations only ended in a negative result, or in the conclusion that the sought-for land could have no existence. Nevertheless it has been found in the very place where its outlines had been drawn by Wrangell on the reports of the natives. The large island, which has been named "Wrangell Land" in posthumous honour of the illustrious navigator, rises high above the water to the north of the Chukchi country, near the northern entrance to Bering Strait. Discovered for the first time by Kellett in 1849, and sighted by the whale fisher Long in 1867, this land is still only faintly traced on the charts. How far it may stretch northwards is still undetermined, nor is it known whether it forms part of the land again seen by Kellett in 1867. Mount Long, at its southernmost extremity, has an elevation of 2,500 feet, and its regular conic form has caused it to be classed with the extinct volcanoes. Nordenskjöld and Palander were prevented by the ice from visiting these islands.
The whole space stretching north of New Siberia and Wrangell Land, and between Franz-Joseph Land and the American polar archipelagos, remains to be explored, nor is it yet known whether it is partly occupied by any northern extension of Greenland, as Petermann supposed, or whether these waters encircle islands or archipelagos alone. In any case no erratic boulders are found on the northern seaboard of Siberia, from which Nordenskjöld concludes that there are no extensive lands in the Siberian polar seas, or rather that the icebergs carry scarcely any rocky detritus with them, as indeed has hitherto been admitted by most geographers. North-west of the Taimir Peninsula the Norwegian navigator Johannsen discovered, in 1878, an island to which he gave the fully justified name of Ensomheden, or "Lone Land." This dreary ice-bound land has an area of about 80 square miles, terminating westwards with high cliffs, above which rises a peak 510 feet high. The sands of the low-lying east shore are strewn with drift-wood stranded here by the current. This island was probably sighted by Laptyev in 1741.
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| Miles. | |||||
| * | Navigable | course of the | Lena | 2,920 | |
| ,, | ,, | Vitim | 345 | ||
| ,, | ,, | Olokma | 600 | ||
| ,, | ,, | Aldan | 900 | ||
| ,, | ,, | Amga | 300 | ||
| ,, | ,, | Maya | 300 | ||
| ,, | ,, | Vilûi | 728 | ||
| Total | 6,085 | Miles. | |||